Interview with Eric Fretz
Linda Tate

Eric Fretz is director of DUs Center for Community Engagement and Service Learning (CCESL), an office focused on helping the university achieve its mission of being a great private university dedicated to the public good. CCESL support[s] faculty in community-based learning and public good efforts at DU, connect[s] university stakeholders with efforts that address critical community issues, and develop[s] students into engaged citizens who actively participate in the public life of their communities. To learn more about CCESL and ways to become involved with its work, visit the CCESL website.

Linda Tate: Where did you go to school?
Eric Fretz: I was a first-generation college student. In fact, I had no intention of going to college. I was planning to go to work with my father, who was a realtor. My mom encouraged me to go to a small Mennonite college in Pennsylvania, my home state. Its been a long road.

Did you think right away that youd made the right decision to go to college?
I almost quit at the end of my first term, but my mom made me go back. At the end of my first sophomore term, we read Camuss The Stranger. The world of ideas and literature got me excited. Then I started reading Thomas Hardy and William Faulkner. I didnt become an English major, however, until my senior year.

What was next for you?
I went to Penn State for a masters degree in American Studies. Thats when I discovered American literature. I met a great professor there a classic 60s radical. He shared with me the work of Melville, Hawthorne, Whitman. That whole world opened up for me.

Where did you get your doctorate?
At Michigan State University in the Department of English. The American Studies program was also in that department.

What was the focus of your dissertation?
Performing selfhood in America from the colonial period to the antebellum period. I started with Copleys portrait of Paul Revere and ended with [P.T.] Barnum. I also looked at Anna Cora Moat, an actress, Hawthornes The Scarlet Letter, and some of Emersons essays.

Where was your first job after graduate school?
I taught at Loras College in Dubuque, Iowa. I was in the Department of English I was the Americanist on their staff. I taught 19th-century American literature, but I also taught courses on Vietnam War literature, literature of the American Dream, and African American literature.

Did you teach writing?
Oh, yes! I taught composition. I loved teaching comp.

Why?
Im very utilitarian. I come from a family of German businessmen and bankers, so I have a strong feeling that all of this should lead to something. I liked helping students develop the skills theyd need to succeed. I liked sharing with them the nuts and bolts of college writing and having fun along the way. Colleagues used to tease me that there was always laughter coming out of my classroom. I always thought if its not fun, whats the point?

But you left Loras and went back to Michigan State. Why?
After I got tenure at Loras, I felt there were other things I needed to do. I enjoyed my time at Loras, but I just didnt feel thats where I should ultimately be. I was more interested in community-based learning than in teaching literature. I still loved teaching literature and still miss teaching it but I was also really interested in service learning.

At Michigan State, I taught in the Writing, Rhetoric, and American Culture program, which services first-year writing courses. I taught courses on Midwest literature and race and ethnicity. Thats when I really started doing service-learning. Thats where David Cooper was, and he became my mentor. He taught me how to do this work. I dont know what I would have done without Cooper. He asked me to team-teach a course wanted to do a service-learning course with me. I wasnt sure I wanted to do it it would take a lot of time. This was a real kind of crucible moment for me. Thank God, I said yes!

Why did you say yes?
Because I generally say yes to things that intrigue me. I thought the course could either go disastrously wrong or gloriously right. It went gloriously right.

We designed and put on a National Issues Forum. It changed everything I thought I could do in a course. Students were writing in my office. They were working with Cooper. They were calling and faxing community partners. They graded their own final projects, and Cooper and I offered our assessments as well. So even the evaluative process was deliberative and collaborative.

This is still the most exciting course Ive ever taught.

What was next?
I went to Colorado State University (in Fort Collins) as the assistant director of the service-learning program. I reinvented myself within higher education and learned how to be an administrator.

I then went to Naropa University, where I started their Community Studies Center. I started that program from scratch.

What brought you to DU?
I was at a Campus Compact conference in Denver and heard Frank [Coyne] and David [Lisman] talking about DUs Public Achievement program. Their project reminded me of Harry Boytes Building America, a book which asks How do you do the Aristotelian model in the classroom? How do you tap into community organizing in class? Thats what Frank and David were doing with the Public Achievement program.

What is the Public Achievement program?
Public Achievement is a school-based civic engagement project. College students or adult volunteers work with small groups of middle or high school students. They help the students do community-based research, teach students to be community organizers. In this way, the students build powerful community relationships with adults.

Many people think that children are empty ciphers that they only consume and complain. But in reality, children have a great deal of interest in and capacity to work through issues of great concern to them issues like bullying or racism, discrimination against youth, and even seemingly mundane things like the quality of their school lunches.

Public Achievement moves away from regular school Paulo Freires idea of the banking model of education. Instead, Public Achievement taps into the self-interest of the kid: whats bugging you? Its civic agency for children. But this is also a cascading system because it works the same powerful way with the college students who work in the program.

A high percentage of the kids in our Public Achievement program receive free or reduced lunch its not hard to find these types of schools in DPS [Denver Public Schools]. Our coaches would never otherwise have a chance to know these types of kids. Thats what diversity is working with people who are different from you.

What kind of writing do you do as part of your work at DU?
I do a mix of utilitarian writing and thought-piece writing. Language is a war and self-contradictory. For example, weve recently developed a new logo for CCESL. Its rather unusual, and most people will ask, What the hell is that? Well need to explain it to folks.

In so many areas, either you let people tell you who you are or you tell people who you are. Thats why writing is crucial.

I write a lot about what were doing and pass my written ideas around to the staff. These arent dictums theyre more like opportunities to start conversations about what it is that were doing.

That treatment will eventually get turned into the directors notes in the newsletter or phrasing well use in our syllabi.

Why is there such a need to describe what CCESL does?
When you say you teach history or teach English or teach writing, people have a general notion of what you mean. But when you say you work in the Center for Community Engagement and Service Learning, there are a thousand notions about what we are.

Its a fun challenge Ive lived these tensions in my life. Ive lived the purely academic life, and Ive also had the mix of the academic and everyday political life. We [CCESL] are looking for people who can appreciate the university as a universe of ideas and practices, people who also want to live the tensions.

Tell me about the thought-pieces that you write.
This year, Ive written four essays. Two of them were in the Journal of Higher Education Outreach and Engagement. One is a chapter in a book on trends in service-learning. One will appear in the Michigan Journal for Community and Service Learning. All but one of these essays were co-authored.

Actually, when I taught at Loras, I got tired of writing. I was more focused on teaching. I found that I just didnt want to write about Anna Cora Moat for the rest of my life. It wasnt until about three years ago that I reacquired my voice.

Now I always do collaborative writing Ill never write alone again. I need other people to push my thoughts. This summer, for example, I wrote with my friend Nick Longo. We used Google Docs and wrote back and forth.

The stuff Im writing now is way more impactful because theres a larger audience for it. For example, I wrote a piece on power. Its on a public achievement website. That piece gets so many hits people across the globe access and use those ideas.

To what degree do you think students interested in social justice professions need to develop their writing skills?
Were about helping students develop public ideas in the tradition of the Greeks up to Hannah Arendt. Its a deep, rich tradition. It wasnt just invented in the 1960s. Its important to have a skillful public life, and a significant portion of this is articulating your ideas on paper. Those who have a public life have ideas; they communicate and inspire other people around those ideas.

I think Barack Obama is a perfect example the Gamaliel Foundation community organizer and trainer. Obama is a great warrior and a great orator. Thats not the be-all and end-all of public life, of course, but whats missing for some is the collaborative piece, the ability to see a plurality, the Aristotelian notion of politics with a small p not a struggle for scarce resources but a collaborative, negotiated set of relationships and decisions.

What advice would you have for these students? How can they develop their writing skills so that they can be most effective in social justice professions?
Take as many classes as they can from you guys [the Writing Program]!

I know we need to create the free spaces for students to develop these skills. The Morgridge Community Scholars is one such free space where students can come together with faculty and work on community development. Id encourage students to take advantage of those opportunities.

I feel that, as teachers, you make a social contract with students. You are educating the next generation to participate skillfully in a democratic society.

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